Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (15 page)

The previous midnight, he told me, they had had orders from the War Office to disband and vanish as quickly as possible; the cooks and military apparatus were required for purposes more urgent than schoolboy manœuvres. He had made his way home between southern trains congested and disorganised by troops hastening to join their regiments, leaving a few seniors - such as Roland - to clear up the camp.

A sudden chill momentarily banished my self-satisfaction as I saw him looking so handsome and fit and efficient; that brief misgiving was my first realisation that a war of the size which was said to be impending was unlikely to remain excitingly but securely confined to the columns of newspapers. So I made myself face what seemed the worst that could possibly happen to us.

‘I was glad to see him back,’ I wrote of Edward that evening, ‘though if matters become extreme it is not impossible that he being a member of the O.T.C. may be called up for home defence.’

After that events moved, even in Buxton, very quickly. The German cousins of some local acquaintances left the town in a panic. My parents rushed over in the car to familiar shops in Macclesfield and Leek, where they laid in stores of cheese, bacon and butter under the generally shared impression that by next week we might all be besieged by the Germans. Wild rumours circulated from mouth to mouth; they were more plentiful than the newspapers, over which a free fight broke out on the station platform every time a batch came by train from London or Manchester. Our elderly cook, who had three Reservist sons, dissolved into continuous tears and was too much upset to prepare the meals with her usual competence; her young daughter-in-law, who had had a baby only the previous Friday, became hysterical and had to be forcibly restrained from getting up and following her husband to the station. One or two Buxton girls were hurriedly married to officers summoned to unknown destinations. Pandemonium swept over the town. Holiday trippers wrestled with one another for the
Daily Mail
; habitually quiet and respectable citizens struggled like wolves for the provisions in the food-shops, and vented upon the distracted assistants their dismay at learning that all prices had suddenly gone up.

My diary for those few days reflects
The Times
in its most pontifical mood. ‘Germany has broken treaty after treaty, and disregarded every honourable tie with other nations . . . Germany has destroyed the tottering hopes of peace . . . The great fear is that our bungling Government will declare England’s neutrality . . . If we at this critical juncture refuse to help our friend France, we should be guilty of the grossest treachery.’

I prefer to think that my real sentiments were more truly represented by an entry written nearly a month later after the fabulously optimistic reports of the Battle of Le Cateau. I had been over to Newcastle-under-Lyme to visit the family dentist, and afterwards sat for an hour in a tree-shadowed walk called The Brampton and meditated on the War. It was one of those shimmering autumn days when every leaf and flower seems to scintillate with light, and I found it ‘very hard to believe that not far away men were being slain ruthlessly, and their poor disfigured bodies heaped together and crowded in ghastly indiscrimination into quickly provided common graves as though they were nameless vermin . . . It is impossible,’ I concluded, ‘to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilisation.’

Only that day I had heard from my dentist that a hundred thousand Russians had been landed in England; ‘a whole trainful of them,’ I reported, ‘is said to have passed through Stoke, so that is why the Staffordshire people are so wise.’ But when I returned to Buxton I learnt that a similar contingent had been seen in Manchester, and for a few days the astonishing ubiquitousness of the invisible Russians formed a topic of absorbing interest at every tea-table throughout the country.

By the time, however, that we started believing in Russians, England had become almost accustomed to the War. On the night that the British ultimatum to Germany expired, I went up to Higher Buxton for a meeting of the University Extension Committee, to which I had recently been elected; we took only a moment to decide to do nothing until the never very ardent local zest for learning re-emerged from its total eclipse by the European deluge, so I spent the rest of the evening in wandering round the town. I read, with a feeling that I had been transported back into an uglier century, the mobilisation order on the door of the Town Hall; I joined the excited little group round the Post Office to watch a number of local worthies who had suddenly donned their Territorial uniforms and were driving importantly about in motorcars with their wives or their chauffeurs at the wheel. Later, on my way home, I found the Pavilion Gardens deserted, and a depressed and very much diminished band playing lugubriously to rows of empty chairs.

My feet ached, and my head whirled dizzily from the vain endeavour to take in what was happening. To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up, like the Black Death and the Great Fire, between the covers of history books. In spite of the efforts of Miss Heath Jones and other intelligent teachers, ‘current events’ had remained for us unimportant precisely because they were national; they represented something that must be followed in the newspapers but would never, conceivably, have to be lived. What really mattered were not these public affairs, but the absorbing incidents of our own private lives - and now, suddenly, the one had impinged upon the other, and public events and private lives had become inseparable . . . Uneasily I recalled a passage from
Daniel Deronda
that I had read in comfortable detachment the year before:

‘There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives - when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war . . . Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested and . . . life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty.’

Edward, whose risks, whatever happened, were likely to be greater than mine, took the whole situation more calmly, as he always took everything. On that evening of August 4th he had gone serenely to the local Hippodrome with a Buxton friend, Maurice Ellinger, who had been with him at school. Maurice was a cousin of the musical comedy actress, Desirée Ellinger, who in those days often stayed in Buxton, a tiny dark doll of a girl about my own age. Her real name was Dorothy; she seemed very childish and often came to our house to sing, in the lovely young voice which she then intended for Grand Opera, Elizabeth’s Prayer from
Tannhäuser
or the Jewel Song from
Faust
to my capricious accompaniment.

Already the two boys were discussing, though quite vaguely, the possibilities of enlisting. When they returned from the Hippodrome they brought back a ‘Late Special’ which told us that no answer had been received from Germany, and Edward related, with much amusement, how he had seen a German waiter thrown over the wall of the Palace Hotel.

For the next few weeks we all suffered from the epidemic of wandering about that had seized everyone in the town. After the tearing-up of the ‘scrap of paper’, the
Daily Mail
had a heart-ravishing leader called ‘The Agony of Belgium’ which made us feel guilty and miserable. At home the atmosphere was electric with family rows, owing to Edward’s expressed wish to ‘do something’. The suggestions put forward with such authoritarian impressiveness by the Headmaster of Uppingham and the O.T.C. organisers had already served their purpose in the national exploitation of youth by its elders; the ‘Three Musketeers’, like so many others, were not only willing but anxious to risk their lives in order to save the face of a Foreign Secretary who had committed his country to an armed policy without consulting it beforehand.

My father vehemently forbade Edward, who was still under military age, to join anything whatsoever. Having himself escaped immersion in the public-school tradition, which stood for militaristic heroism unimpaired by the damping exercise of reason, he withheld his permission for any kind of military training, and ended by taking Edward daily to the mills to divert his mind from the War. Needless to say, these uncongenial expeditions entirely failed of their desired effect, and constant explosions - to which, having inherited so many of my father’s characteristics, I seemed only to add by my presence - made our house quite intolerable. A new one boiled up after each of Edward’s tentative efforts at defiance, and these were numerous, for his enforced subservience seemed to him synonymous with everlasting disgrace. One vague application for a commission which he sent to a Notts and Derby regiment actually was forwarded to the War Office - ‘from which,’ I related with ingenuous optimism, ‘we are expecting to hear every post.’

When my father discovered this exercise of initiative, his wrath and anxiety reached the point of effervescence. Work of any kind was quite impossible in the midst of so much chaos and apprehension, and letters to Edward from Roland, describing his endeavours to get a commission in a Norfolk regiment, did nothing to ease the perpetual tension. Even after the result of my Oxford Senior came through, I abandoned in despair the Greek textbooks that Roland had lent me. I even took to knitting for the soldiers, though only for a very short time; utterly incompetent at all forms of needlework, I found the simplest bed-socks and sleeping-helmets altogether beyond me. ‘Oh, how I wish I could wake up in the morning,’ concludes one typical day’s entry describing these commotions, ‘to find this terrible war the dream it seems to me to be!’

2

Few of humanity’s characteristics are more disconcerting than its ability to reduce world-events to its own level, wherever this may happen to lie. By the end of August, when Lie‘ge and Namur had fallen, and the misfortunes of the British Army were extending into the Retreat from Mons, the ladies of the Buxton élite had already set to work to provincialise the War.

At the First Aid and Home Nursing classes they cluttered about the presiding doctor like hens round a barnyard cock, and one or two representatives of ‘the set’, who never learnt any of the bandages correctly themselves, went about showing everybody else how to do them. In order to have something to take me away from the stormy atmosphere at home, I went in for and passed both of these elementary examinations, at which stout ‘patients’, sitting on the floor with flushed and worried faces, were treated for various catastrophes by palpitating and still stouter ‘nurses’.

An hotel in the main street, Spring Gardens, was turned into a Red Cross Supply Depot, where ‘helpers’ went to listen to the gossip that would otherwise have been carried on more privately over tea-tables. They wasted so much material in the amateur cutting-out of monstrous shirts and pyjamas, that in the end a humble local dressmaker whom my mother employed for our summer cottons had to be called in to do the real work, while the polite female society of Buxton stalked up and down the hotel rooms, rolled a few bandages, and talked about the inspiration of helping one’s country to win the War. One or two would-be leaders of fashion paraded continually through the town in new Red Cross uniforms. Dressed in their most elaborate lace underclothing, they offered themselves as patients to would-be bandagers and bed-makers, and one of them disliked me intensely because, in a zestful burst of vigour, I crumpled the long frills of her knickers by tucking them firmly into the bed.

Already my link with Oxford had given me the ability to regard local scrambles and squabbles over the Home Nursing classes, and the Supply Depot, and the newly-opened Red Cross convalescent hospital, with an amused detachment of which I had not been capable so long as Buxton had seemed to me a Nazareth whence no good thing and no worth-while person was ever likely to emerge. This sense of release from the strain of the first shattering weeks increased considerably after I had received another letter from Roland, who wrote that his application for a commission had been refused on account of imperfect eyesight - a defect which his youthful vanity had hitherto concealed from me. He had tried in vain the infantry, the artillery, and the Army Service Corps, and though he was still endeavouring to get the objection to his eyesight removed, the possibility that he would be at Oxford with me after all came once more into the foreground.

‘Come what may,’ he told me in sudden enthusiasm after hearing that I was safely through my Oxford Senior, ‘I
will
go now. And I look forward to facing a hedge of chaperons and Principals with perfect equanimity if I may be allowed to see something of you on the other side.’

My heart rejoiced absurdly, but I made one of my spasmodic resolutions to be sceptical.

‘I don’t think I am ever likely to marry as I am too hard to please . . .’ I informed my diary after going to one of the numerous local weddings that followed the outbreak of War. ‘I would be satisfied with nothing less than a mutually comprehensive loving companionship. I could not endure to be constantly propitiating any man, or to have a large range of subjects on which it was quite impossible to talk to him.’

In the early autumn, Edward and I went to stay for a week at St Monica’s, for I wanted to buy some new clothes in London - where the numerous flags fluttering above the river made me childishly pleased that we had so many Allies - and Edward, after what seemed like an eternity of perturbation but was really only a few weeks after the outbreak of War, had at last been given reluctant permission by my father to apply to the Senior O.T.C. at Oxford for training as an officer.